With the Halo 3 beta is full motion and the renewed talk of Halo 3 being Microsoft's key to profitability this fall I thought I'd shed my thoughts on Halo 3 and how it will affect gamers this fall. It's no surprise that Halo 1 and 2 where the most profitable games for Microsoft and Halo 2 is still one of the most played games online still almost three years after the game was released. A lot of talk lately has been about how Halo 3 will sells tons of copies but the question is will the game sell consoles?

When Gears of War came out last fall it was considered the must buy game that would help sell 360s to the xbox gamers that have not yet moved to the next generation. Well that did not exactly happen they way people expected. In October of '06, the month Gears came out, the 360 only moved 218,000 units which was actually 40K less than the previous month. Gears went on to sell to an amazing 50% of the user base in North America but the holiday numbers for 360s sold was good but not significantly boosted like many would have thought.

Now we are approaching The Holiday season of '07 and Halo 3 will be coming out in September. Again pre-orders are said to be in the 4 million range for Halo 3 so the question is will Halo 3 move consoles or just copies? It's believed that the people playing Halo 2 online now on original Xbox will make the jump when Halo 3 comes out. I'm not so sure that's the case. Halo 2 came out when the original Xbox was priced at $199 and the differences between Halo 2 and Halo 3 online are not significant. I think price will be an issue for these games and they will be content playing Halo 2 on the original Xbox till either their system break or Halo 2 is no longer supported online. I people that will be buying a 360 to play Halo 2 are the people that loved playing the campaign and got sick of the cheaters online. Those people may be willing to go out and as the slogan goes, 'finish the fight'.

When September comes out I think you will see a healthy number of 360s will be sold but it will not be anything like when Halo 2 came out. The majority of core Halo fans have already moved to the 360 and are playing Gears of War. What Microsoft needs to go is offer more games in other genres to improve sales. When Blue Dragon comes out this summer I expect to see a big bump in sales as this JRPG will appeal to a whole different market of gamers.